Computing devices, such as cellular telephones and laptop computers, may be configured to connect to a local area network, such as a wireless local area network. The local area network may be used by the computing device to access a wide area network, such as the wide area network commonly referred to as the Internet. Access to the Internet may require authentication of the computing device by another device, such as a proxy server, that manages access to the Internet.
Conventionally, a user performs several steps in order to configure a computing device to connect to a wireless local area network (WLAN) and authenticate the device prior to being granted access to the Internet using the WLAN. For example, the user may enter a service set identifier (SSID) of a WLAN into a configuration window of the computing device to configure the device to connect to the WLAN. In addition, the user may typically open a web browser and enter authentication information using a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) authentication mechanism. After performing these steps, the user may then be granted access to the Internet using the WLAN.